California Summit aims to spur governments to do more to tackle climate change

The genesis of this summit can be traced to the 2015 Paris climate talks.

Leaders from local and state governments, business, and civil society have come together in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit organised by California Governor Jerry Brown to send a “clear signal” to national governments to step their efforts to tackle climate change.

“We are trying to recreate the kind of impulse, the kind of energy the kind of enthusiasm that gave governments the confidence to take the Paris Agreement over the line but this time in the context of what we have to do by 2020,” said Nick Nuttall, director communications, Global Climate Action Summit.

The genesis of this summit can be traced to the 2015 Paris climate talks. In the months preceding the UN-sponsored climate talks in Paris, there had been significant mobilisation by businesses, cities, and regional and provincial governments that signalled clear support to the national governments to move ahead and finalise the 2015 climate treaty. Conceived as an effort to preserve and promote that momentum, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and his subsequent decision, fulfilling a campaign promise, to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, gave the summit yet another purpose. “The summit, with its focus on sub-national and non-state climate actors, is critical to maintain the momentum when the US federal government is shirking its responsibility and commitment to the world,” said Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the New Delhi-based think tank Council on Energy, Environment, and Water.

Nuttall, however, argues that this more than just about US businesses and local and state governments stepping in and reiterating their commitment to achieving the Paris Agreement goals and climate plans and targets pledged by the Obama administration under the climate deal. Nuttall, who served as the spokesperson of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said that he doesn’t think that anyone ever thought that the achieving the Paris Agreement would be “some kind of calm sailing”.

“If the overall movement of the world is up and determined to address the Paris Agreement, then those governments that are less enthusiastic are likely to find themselves on the wrong side of history, and likely to find themselves on the wrong side of what the planet and the people living on it actually need-- which is a low carbon/de-carbonised world with all kinds of new job opportunities and all kind of new sectors.”

The summit is an opportunity to showcase climate action but also a moment to spur more action or as the GCAS theme puts it to Take Ambition to the Next Level.

“The summit aims to reinstall momentum in climate action as well as bring together leaders from government as well as private institutions and companies to take up more climate commitments,” said Ajay Mathur, director-general of the New Delhi based think tank and research outfit, TERI.

“This is the first wave of stepping up, moving up, taking ambition to a higher level coming from the business, the economy, and sub national governments trying to send a clear signal to national governments to move up with their ambition sooner rather than later because 2020 is the year that scientific risk assessments say we should be peaking global greenhouse gas emissions,” say Nuttall.

Just ahead of the GCAS, Indian companies including UltraTech Cement, Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd, Mahindra Heavy Engines Ltd, and Godrej Industries Limited and Associate Companies announced climate actions they would undertake. Anand Mahindra, executive chairman of the Mahindra Group, who serves as co-chair of the summit was instrumental in getting corporations across the world to adopt science based targets with this challenge at Davos.

Ghosh said that India must use this opportunity provided by the California summit to “demonstrate its climate actions, by virtue of its power of resistance to inequities in climate politics, its power of example set through domestic policies and actions, and its power of leadership at the international level, such as the International Solar Alliance."

The three-day global summit will culminate with a Call to Global Climate Action to all sectors of the economy but with a focus on national governments. Nuttall said that the call to action will be taken by Patricia Espinosa to the UN General Assembly and brought into that One Planet Summit that French President Emmanuel Macron is doing during Climate Week by travellers in an electric car that will leave San Francisco on the 14th of September and pass through states like Nevada, Kansas and New Jersey meeting the public, auto workers and those acting on climate change.

But that is not the end of the road for the Global Climate Action Summit, the idea is to keep up the momentum. “The idea is to ensure that all challenges issued before the GCAS to investors, businesses and cities don't just end in 2018 but build over the next two years and beyond.” He said the idea is to ensure “a bigger wave from these sectors as we approach the UNSG’s Leaders’ Summit so that governments will feel a strong wind of support to raise their national climate action plans.